10 Tactics for Video Optimization

This is an area of SEO that got hot once Google started showing “Universal Results”. Universal results is just a term that means Google includes in the Search results everything now. Along with the organic text listings are News, Images, Shopping, and Video. Google pulls these search results from all types of different websites.

The big question is “How can I get my video there?” Now it behooves advertisers & publishers to conduct a Video Optimization for specific keywords related to the video. In many cases it’s worth the time & money invested to get your video to the top of the search results page.

Without showing any of my client work, I’ll show a personal video that is ranking. Search for the term, AFX race cars.

10 Tactics for Video Optimization:
1. Use the Keyword in the Title. Make the Title sound interesting.
2. Write approx 2 paragraphs of text for the Description.
3. Tag each video with keywords.
4. Choose proper category for each video.
5. It’s best to put a hyperlink to the target page within the Description, but before the user needs to click (more info) to see the hyperlink.
6. Upload all videos to multiple video sites (Youtube, Viddler, etc)
7. Comments help by showing interest, and by additional user-generated content (more words on the page).
8. Video responses show interest/activity.
9. Rating. Try to get as many 5 star ratings as you can 😉
10. Views, views, and more views.

Treat the video as you would any other webpage, and begin a Link building optimization to increase the amount of Inbound links. Ideally, your objective is to increase Link popularity and Link relevancy. While building links for your off-site optimization, try to mix up textlinks and the number of Embeds. All these are Video Ranking Factors.

A great productivity tool to upload videos to multiple video sharing sites is TubeMogul .

Great article! I did a search for AFX Race cars abd waddayaknow there was a utube video link to your video! I believe video optimization is going to become more and more important as online video continues its popularity climb.

This is a very good list and thank you for posting it. However, I would like to point out 2 things.

1 – use your targeted keywords first in the video description and do not use trash words.

Instead of “This is a video about a cute kitten”. Get rid of the trash words and move the targeted keywords to the front. A title like this will get your better ranking then the example – “cute kitten video”.

2 – same thing as the title, but with the description. Use targeted keywords in the first sentence of the video description. And try to use the targeted keywords as the first words of the video description.